Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

I vote Republican because I see absolutely no correlation between lenient gun laws and surging crime rates

I'm with you on a lot of this stuff, except for this one which is blatantly false.

"Crime rates have varied over time, with a sharp rise after World War II, before peaking between the 1970s and early 1990s. Since the early 1990s, crime has declined in the United States, and current crime rates are approximately the same as those of the 1960s." (citations in article)

Now that I've got my flip answer out of the way, it's probably best that I don't leave your little talking points unaddressed.(UPDATE: Comboman's response is probably wittier and more concise - someone send 'em a gold star please. But I went to the trouble to type all this, so I'm going to post it anyways. It's the internet way.)

I vote Democrat because I believe it’s okay if our federal government borrows $85 Billion every single month.

Yup. Years of neglect have left our infrastructure in a sorry state, inherited wars cost money(!), and let's not even talk about the shitpile that was the economy. When Bush II handed over the reins. (A resounding win for Financial deregulation, wouldn't you say?)

I vote Democrat because I care about the children but saddling them with trillions of dollars of debt to pay for my bloated leftist government is okay.

This is really the same as the last one, but hey, it's still better than inventing evidence and starting a war that result in the deaths of ~4,500 of our kids, and maiming or otherwise injuring ~32,000 more (and totally ignoring the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens as a result of said war).

I vote Democrat because I believe it’s better to pay billions of dollars to people who hate us rather than drill for our own oil, because it might upset some endangered beetle or gopher.

Last I checked, we'd rather reduce our dependence on oil altogether (By jump-starting the wind and solar industries in the US), but big oil and coal has been lobbying like there's no tomorrow to prevent that.

I vote Democrat because I believe it is okay if liberal activist judges rewrite the Constitution to suit some fringe kooks, who would otherwise never get their agenda past the voters.

No worries, the conservatives engage in plenty of this too, especially in cases involving the 2nd ammendment and abortion rights (Hobby lobby decision was decided by 5 men who were conservative Catholics).

I vote Democrat because I believe that corporate America should not be allowed to make profits for themselves or their shareholders. They need to break even and give the rest to the federal government for redistribution.

Dude, you are crazy. No company should be able to avoid paying taxes through financial sleight of hand, but really, you think GE is paying too much tax for the benefits of being an american corporation? Apple?

I vote Democrat because I’m not concerned about millions of babies being aborted, so long as we keep all of the murderers on death row alive.

As opposed to that other party, who preaches the sanctity of life, but is giddy to kill inmates.

I vote Democrat because I believe it’s okay if my Nobel Peace Prize winning President uses drones to assassinate people, as long as we don’t use torture.

Guess what? Most humans don't think that anyone should either engage in torture, or send drones to kill other humans. Shocking! One of two is a reasonable start, and we're working on the other one. At least we don't have Bush/Cheny in charge any more, they were fine with both.

I vote Democrat because I believe people, who can’t accurately tell us if it will rain on Friday, can predict the polar ice caps will melt away in ten years if I don’t start driving a Chevy Volt.

You do know the difference between climatology and meteorology, right? It's like the difference between socialism and communism (or patriotism and fascism, if you swing that way.) The later is a tiny subset of the former.

I vote Democrat because Freedom of Speech is not as important as preventing people from being offended.

Aw, here you're just trying to stir things up. I'm pretty sure the courts have a well-used system in pl

From what the article shows, it seems like a lot of this information is public knowledge - where substations and water plants are and how they operate. Pretty much everyone in my town knows where the local substations are, and it doesn't take a genius to know that an attack that disables or destroys a substation would have a massive impact on the people living there. None of these documents appear to be classified, which means they don't contain anything that DHS was afraid of the general public knowing.

It would be a different story if these were classified documents containing things like the floor plans for nuclear plants and gaps in security at said plants that could actually be useful in an attack, but this seems like a non-story other than that DHS's FOIA officer got lazy and just CTRL+F'd for "Aurora" and blindly copied anything with that word in the name.

For example*snip* How many milliseconds on and milliseconds off must I send the command to end up 120 degrees out of phase? What kind of out of phase protection relay is in service?

360 degrees of phase every 1/60th of a second. 120 degrees is 1/3rd that, so minimum of 1/3 of 1/60 or 1/90th of a second....that would be common knowledge to anyone in the USA who hears 60 cycle hums on electrical lines or as line noise. Whether that would be how long the breaker would need to be off to get the generator that far out of phase, I don't know. But I really want to dig through this paper and see if the person I know who does know how long it takes, and warned the DOE and DHS about it, is menti

maybe remove these from maps both printed and Google? Yes it's ridiculous but I'm sure these ideas are kicking around. I read someplace that shortly after 9-11, some cities removed addresses of fire department stations because they felt if terrorists knew where these are they can disrupt first responders.

You are correct, it does sound ridiculous. However, a lot of things sound that way in today's world.

Maybe the FBI and NSA couldn't use the monitoring they are doing on Americans to find people looking for this stuff in some attempt to find a terrorist cell so they released them to narrow down their search (either by looking closer at those who download it or those who don't but searched for it previously).

As for first responders, You can always know where first responders are by creating an accident that r

that nothing can be kept secret anymore? Whatever you want not to be exposed, whether diplomatic communications or technical documents or "intellectual property", will eventually reach the internet either by whistle-blowing or human error? And once it reaches the internet, if anyone cares about it then it will be perpetuated forever?

There are advantages to such a situation, of course, but also disadvantages.

There is no such thing as whistle blowing in the US, since the US classifies giving classified information to "someone that is not supposed to have it" as treason under the Espionage Act of 1917.

And it isn't just whistle blowing - the White House recently committed treason by exposing the CIA operative in Afghanistan, for instance (and then said "whoops"). Note that the White House decided not to prosecute itself, just as it chose not to prosecute Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage for the same crime (in Plam

No, I don't. I get the impression that these documents were freely available, unclassified, public information. Or was DHS really trying to keep the location of that big-ass power substation down the street from me a secret?

'Information wants to be free' is just a badly constructed wannabe-meme similar in quality to Apple's 'Think Different' slogan. Basically, it's the kind of drivel marketing types who dropped too much acid in college come up with.

Why would anybody claim that the people who point this out have 'bad language skills'?

You see, those dept.'s want even more of your money, and what with terrorists keeping quiet these days and the extremists
being ID''ed by whether or not they read Linux Journal, the DHS, TSA, NSA and any other acronym that's got the coveted 'S',
are starting to look pathetic.
Can't have that!

Isn't there supposed to be some gov't office or book of code names to ensure that secret project names are not re-used? Someone looks up 'Aurora' and sees that this was declassified years ago. So they upload it to the public site. Whoops.

I'm doing a study on architecture in New York City. I think I'll call it the Manhattan Project.

There's nothing mysterious about this. The problem is that if someone gets control of circuit breakers for large rotating equipment, they may be able to disconnect it, let it get out of sync, and reconnect it. This causes huge stresses on motor and generator windings and may damage larger equipment. This is a classic problem in AC electrical systems. [ieee.org] A more technical analysis of the Aurora vulnerability is here. [selinc.com]

The attack involves taking over control of a power breaker in the transmission system, one tha